An original and well-made puzzle platformer. The twist is that you're controlling a puddle of liquid by tilting the screen - and it may be difficult to keep it all in one place. Failure can be gradual - losing a tiny drop is no big deal, but they add up throughout the level. The game can be almost as frustrating as Super Meat Boy - and almost as fun. I've encountered a few bugs - most are error messages, but one is a persistent crash towards the end of the game.

Puddle is a puzzle-platform game that makes clever use of advanced physics to let you move all kinds of liquids through different obstacle courses. While the idea itself sounds rather straightforward, the execution is certainly not. The first levels, using water as a liquid, are not too difficult and I thought "tihs game is going to be a piece of cake". But how wrong I was (am actually). Difficulty goes up steeply and the developers have really thought of all kinds of possible liquid and obstacles to make life ever more difficult. Water, oil, goo, fertilizer, nitroglycerine, all pass the review and all ask for a different approach. This keeps the game interesting, since the visual context changes accordingly to the liquid being processed. And since the visuals are really outstanding for an in essence static background, the developers have done a good job.

But after a couple of hours, my interest in the game diminished since I got tired of the trial-and-error which seemed to be necessary in some of the later levels. So I let the game rest for a couple of weeks, and picked it up again recently. Now I pick up some levels ad random and try to get more of the Steam achievements, which are a clever addition to the game. All in all, this game is a nice sideway away from any larger-scale gaming projects, but don't expect anything more really. If Steam reviews would have a "neutral" option, this one would get one. But in the end I give it a "thumbs up", if only for an original idea being well executed, with a lot of love for the project being involved.

Don't be fooled by its appealing graphics; under the polished visuals lies a frustrating, slow and clunky physics-based platformer which unfortunately doesn't become much more interesting as the game progresses.

The general summarized gameplay, "get these things to the end of the level", is accomplished much better by other physics-based games like World of Goo or Mercury. Get those instead, and save yourself a headache.

21 of 23 people (91%) found this review helpful1 person found this review funny

Recommended

4.1 hrs on record

Posted: September 18, 2014

There’s nothing better than a game that takes a simple idea and runs with it. Puddle does more than that. It runs, drips and oozes its idea through almost every conceivable formulation.Levels characteristically take the form of a laboratory or industrial setting – somewhere with a lot of pipes and tubes. By tilting that scene left and right and letting physics do the hard work, you guide a volume of liquid through various courses. Along the way a multitude of hazards from furnaces to buzz-saws threaten to simmer and splatter your solution.That’s the sum of Puddle’s mechanics, but it’s how it pours this concept into dozens of different scenarios that makes it so engaging.The liquids vary greatly, each with a series of challenges designed around it. What really elevates Puddle above many other physics puzzlers is not these individual puzzles, but how they are cleverly threaded together. The entire game progresses in this contraption-like manner, adding a sprinkling of adventure to the proceedings. The only other issue is the controls. Puddle uses the left and right mouse buttons to tilt the screen in the corresponding direction, but there is no way to adjust the extent of the tilt aside from repeatedly releasing and pressing the buttons. Consequently, great care is required in timing movements; otherwise the liquid might accelerate too quickly and separate into smaller globules, usually leading to a slippery end.All in all, Puddle looks like a simplistic game – after all, you have to press only two buttons. But it offers so many diverse challenges that you'll be quickly proven otherwise.

Fun game but frustrating, I did not finish the last episode. Each map should have at least one check point so you players don't have to start all over again. There should also be the ability to move the camera to look around what's coming next instead of doing trial and error every 10 seconds. The difficulty in the maps is very not linear. Some are super hard while others are fair. The ability to skip a few maps is vital for the game.

The most fun liquid was the molten metal but there was too little usage of the hardening property. Nitroglycerin was fun too but should have more use of it's unique property. The scrap yard maps and the body maps were the hardest.

If there was to be a sequel I would like to see acid that corrodes stuff, water that needs to be frozen to ice at certain sitations, magnetic liquid, mercury and non-newtonian liquid. There could be maps with other liquids on which the player's liquid floats upon like oil on water.

It is a fun puzzle game that involves liquid physics.Each chapter portrays different scenarios with different liquids and each one makes an interconnection to the other in somehow. This makes an interesting story to follow.

The game has several kind of liquids, each one with different characteristics like viscosity and velocity over different surfaces.A negative point is the lack of controllability. You can only tilt your screen to the left or right and this give you low control of the fluids.

Some levels can be very frustrating because you have to memorize the entire level in order to complete it. But that's not so difficult to do it.

There are very interesting achievements to unlock. The most difficult one is to earn all 48 gold medals. This requires you to finish all levels carrying as much fluid as you can on the lowest possible time.

19 of 28 people (68%) found this review helpful1 person found this review funny

Not Recommended

3.2 hrs on record

Posted: October 3, 2014

Great concept and all, but terrible execution. Levels require an annoying amount of precision that just can't be achieved with liquids... at least not liquids as non-cohesive as these. What's more, some levels seem almost designed to force you to lose large amounts of liquid, such as levers that you have to "pull" dropping down and bottlenecking the liquid behind it while the rest of it races forwards for no clear reason. Some of the levels seem like they were tested for use with a solid ball, and the liquids were put in there as an afterthought. What's worse is that most levels require you to know what's ahead and plan for it even though you've never seen it; and many of those require you to be at some particular speed between letting the liquid just do its thing and full tilt.

And the kicker is that the game has the nerve to call you a "whiner" (read: about as close to "little b*tch" as it can while keeping a kid-friendly rating) when you want to play normal mode or can't get past the clunky controls and poor level design.

All in all, 5/10. Absolutely great concept, but the poor controls and poorer level design just make it an infuriating game.

Interesting game. I've already finished nearly half of the levels in a little over two hours (and I am sure some of that was time away from my computer or watching something momentarially-as lately I have been watching YouTube in the background.I say 'finished' half of the levels because some, if not many of them I didn't even rank in. I have more copper than silver and more 'check marks' (i.e. finished, but did not rank) than gold (and likely silver).But the poor 'what exactly do I need to do to rank copper, silver or gold, isn't really the problem... anyone can figure that out after playing a level a few times... no, the problem I found is that in the labratory levels, specifically playing Nitroglycerin, if you start the second level of without directly beating the prior-and even then sometimes-your will immediately explode, restart the level and repeat. Even that can be a simple error in coding, not spawning the liquid correctly, or the game assuming the liquid is moving too quickly as it 'jumps' into existance... but when you get to the Body levels, and specifically the blood levels I constantly get a divide by zero warning. This doesn't crash the game, but it does freeze it until I 'windows key' out and click 'ok'.I haven't gotten past these levels yet, as I fet it inportant to add this to a review. If you are programming anything you really NEED to make sure you don't have code divide by zero. Usually it will completely crash software (ah, the blue screens of old), and I'm not entirely sure how this software is able to cope with it.The game looks finished and even polished, until you reach the bugs that clearly show it is not. It is still fun to play, and for those who feel the need to get gold on everything you'll have a challenge... but they really needed to go over their software and make sure things worked correctly, each time, for all hardware.(A FYI, I'm on an HP Pavillion 7000, with Intel I7 and nVidia GeForce 630M, running WIndows 7--so it isn't like I'm trying to run the game on obscure hardware or software).

EDIT: So, I've had to 'skip' some levels... Space is hard, and the level just before also has the divide by zero error...

20 of 30 people (67%) found this review helpful4 people found this review funny

Not Recommended

4.3 hrs on record

Posted: July 7, 2015

Puddle seems like an interesting liquid physics game. It has a wide variety of liquids in different levels with different properties which you move by tilting the level, attempting to reach the end in the least amount of time possible while losing the least amount of liquid possible. It should be fun, and at the beginning it is, though it quickly loses its luster.

To start with, the developers have the gall to give you "whine" tokens to skip levels and on the difficulty selection, go on about how playing on normal is for whiners. Seriously? I haven't seen such hostile behavior towards players since Phil Fish's "PC's are for spreadsheets" debacle.

The game starts off well, giving you a good variety of liquids to use and obstacles to overcome. Goal times vary wildly, with some levels being trivially easy to get a gold medal on, and others near impossible. Towards the end of the game, levels can become quite frustrating with precision "jumps" required using liquid that spreads out often beyond your view on the screen. Then I got to the zero gravity levels, where instead of controlling gravity, you control slow-moving paddles to bat the liquid around in levels filled with walls that destroy the liquid. It has to be the worst idea anyone has ever had for a physics game and stopped me from progressing any further.